Usual Rubbish

Root cellar blues.


Don’t tell me what day it is. No, really – I don’t want to know. Just let me pretend that it’s still Saturday. Yessss…. Saturday….

Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I’m liable to post ANYTHING while I’m sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That’s all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with “P” followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don’t forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that’s pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in … HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!!

Word to the wise – he gets kind of ornery sometimes. Or at least since we sent him down that enormous rabbit hole that Mitch Macaphee dug in the flagstone floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill, where we  live. Something happened to Marvin down there… something no human should ever experience. Namely, being stuck in a small air pocket with the man-sized tuber. Ever spend a weekend with a sack of potatoes? I mean, like, when you were a kid, sleeping in the root cellar of your uncle’s farm, or something. Well… whether you have or not, THAT’S the kind of thing Marvin had to get through this past week. Something broke deep inside of him. (I think it might have been a c-clamp, but I won’t be sure until I take him in for service later this month.)

Mitch, thankfully, has given up on his idea to build a radical new transportation system circumventing the surface of the Earth entirely in favor of direct routes through its chewy nougat center. However sound that idea may have seemed, it turned out to be surprisingly impractical. Who knew there were so many obstacles deep beneath the Earth’s crust? I always assumed this was one of those relatively inexpensive planets – you know, the ones that are hollow inside? A hollow chocolate world. No, sir… turns out it’s not. The Earth, you see, is like an enormous malted milk ball, except instead of some kind of hydrogenated artificially-flavored wad of sugar and cornstarch, it’s full of rock and dirt and molten lava. Yeah, man… who knew? Guess I should have paid more attention in school. Let that be a lesson to ALL of you kids out there. STOP READING THIS BLOG! SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!

Well, my eyelids are telling me to sign off. And I never give them an argument… at least not for very long.

Political Rants

Oilcano.

The price of oil is going up. Way up. In fact, it looks like it’s going to cost us the whole Gulf Coast.

Don’t know if you heard this story on NPR, but apparently the oil volcano (as Rachel Maddow has been calling it) in the Gulf may be spewing ten times as much crude as BP has been estimating. That’s up to 70,000 barrels a day, according to this analysis. With all the finger-pointing going on between the various overfed corporations involved in engineering this catastrophe, I guess there just hasn’t been enough opportunity to calculate exactly how much toxic sludge is pumped into this vast body of water upon which millions of people – and countless animals – depend. This is almost beyond comment, and it happened before the echo died on Obama’s announcement that he would be opening more offshore areas to oil exploration. As great as that sounded at the time, it’s getting better and better by the day.

These companies are falling all over themselves trying to limit their liability. Not surprising, but quite honestly, why should they be allowed to do anything of the sort? Is anyone going to limit the liability of every living thing along the Gulf coast? Can a limit be placed on how much people, birds, fish, an entire ecosystem, in fact, will be allowed to suffer? And what the hell happens when we try to place a limit on how much companies like BP can take in profits? Excess profit taxes always raise cries of socialism, unjust takings, etc. These guys have been making billions hand over fist for the last few years in particular with no limits whatsoever. But liability for a massive catastrophe like this – that can be limited, somehow? Ludicrous beyond belief.

The plain fact is, there is nothing these companies can offer that will mitigate the damage done to the Gulf and the coastline and wetlands surrounding it. We will hear all about how much money they’re spending on clean-up. But the lesson of these big spills – and this one is really in a category by itself, since it is still spilling – is that ultimately the damage is permanent. I’m not saying that there’s no hope for minimizing its effects. What I’m suggesting is that, like Exxon in Alaska, these companies will delay, deny, and litigate against any meaningful reparation for years, perhaps decades to come. That is the pattern, and unless our government does something about it, it will play out the same way again.

This is the legacy of decades of deregulation and a cozy relationship between oversight agencies and the polluters they keep watch on. Time for a shake up, big time.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Saving something.


It’s not use – that guitar string just isn’t long enough. We could tie two or three of them together. Or maybe a banjo string…. they’re kind of stretchy, aren’t they?

Yeah, it’s us again. Big Green, standing at the rim of another hole to the center of the Earth. Damn, this gets tiresome sometimes. We’re not complicated people, you know… aside from that psychology thing. All we want to do is hang out at our abandoned hammer mill, make a little music, watch the stars from the rooftops, bend pretzels on alternate Thursdays, and shoot arrows through the persistent space/time warp in the washroom that Mitch created so many months ago. It’s the simple things that give the most pleasure, is it not? (No, really… I want to know. It is the simple things, isn’t it?) And yet we are perpetually faced with these complications, these Gordian knots, these Rubic Cubes, these Junior Jumbles, these Uncle Art’s Funland spot-the-differences cartoons, these…

Okay, right… well, this little problem we have may not be as difficult as one Uncle Art can typically dish up, but it’s a poser, that’s for sure. You see, Mitch has been building this complex system of tunnels to various destinations on the globe (some actually on the surface of the globe, but – and this is important – NOT ALL). Of course, a project this ambitious requires rigorous testing to ensure the safety of the patrons Mitch hopes to eventually charge MUCHO DINERO for the privilege of riding his trans-Earth trolley through the planet’s chewy center.

Who’s doing the testing? Well, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) volunteered (after Mitch worked on his self-preservation programming a bit). Then, of course, we had to send the man-sized tuber in after Marvin when Marvin somehow got himself lost in the bowels of the Earth. (What the hell… it’s a freaking GLOBE, right? Go in ANY direction and you will find the surface!) Now we’re trying to throw them both a line. They seem to have commandeered a ledge down there somewhere. That’s where the guitar strings came in. (What can I tell you? We’ve never been all that resourceful. )

I’m de-stringing the banjo as we speak. Hold on tubey! Here comes something like a rope…

Weird ass music since 1986